Michel Foucault at 100: Ideas for Today?

The two articles whose translations follow are not critiques of each other but complement one another, with the authors examining the relationship between Foucault's ideas and the traditions and currents of the Left. This post, "Michel Foucault at 100: Ideas for Today?", first appeared on Safir Arjan.

According to Ambassador Arjan, October 15 of this year (23 Mehr) is the 100th anniversary of the birth of Michel Foucault, a famous French thinker whose theories have been significant and enlightening in explaining and explaining the hidden layers of authority and power at the top and bottom of human societies. Foucault was born in 1926 and died in 1984 at the age of 57.

In the last ten months, the German newspaper Tats has published an article by an expert familiar with Foucault's ideas on the 15th of each month, either criticizing these ideas or praising them. One of these articles is about Foucault's infatuation with the Islamic Revolution in 1357 and then turning away from this opinion. You will read the translation of this article later. I will read the translation of one or two other articles from this collection of ten articles here.

The two articles, the translations of which are given below, are not criticisms of each other, but they are complementary, and the authors examine the relationship between Foucault's ideas and tradition and left-wing thinking. The first article was written by Philip Zarazin, a professor of history and a professor at the University of Zurich, and in it, focusing on Foucault's bias towards social classes and groups, he tries to answer the question of whether he had a relationship with left-wing ideas and what his tense theoretical relationship with people like Sartre and Chomsky was, and what does it tell us in this context. Zarazin, who in the framework of his theoretical discussion digs because of Foucault's positive attitude towards the 1357 Iranian revolution, ultimately does not reach a decisive answer to the question he raised, but there are some noteworthy points in his article.

The second article was written by Julian Nikolai Hoffmann, professor of political theories and ideas and professor at the University of Marburg, Germany, entitled "Foucault and the coldest of all cold monsters". Hoffman believes that Foucault's relationship with the left can be better recognized and defined not necessarily in the way he looks or his distance and closeness to social classes and groups, but in the effects and consequences of his theory for left projects, including the welfare state. In his article, Hoffman discusses why Foucault's thought, despite the fact that it seems to be presented from a leftist origin, was mixed with neoliberalism, which was shaping the political and economic spirit of his time, and why Foucault's criticism of the government actually played an important role in the situation that leftist projects such as the welfare state found, and where this situation has led western societies today, and...

Was Michel Foucault a leftist? It seemed that this question had a clear answer sixty years ago. In 1966, when The Order of Things was published—a highly scholarly and difficult-to-read study of modern knowledge systems—Jean-Paul Sartre scathingly declared, "This new ideology is the last bulwark which the bourgeoisie can still erect against Marx."

Foucault did not really argue in the way one would normally expect of a left-wing thinker. He believed that Marx's criticism of David Ricardo, the "classical" economist, was nothing more than "a storm in a teacup"; A position that seems to completely question the critical claim of Marxism. At the same time, the New Left had discovered and turned to the "humanist" Marx of the Paris Manuscripts of 1844. But Foucault claimed that "man" as the point of departure, the standard and the goal of all knowledge, is nothing but an invention belonging to a "not so distant era"; An invention that for this very reason may disappear again, as "a face on the seashore disappears in the sand".

How did Foucault arrive at such a provocative theory? It was clear that the boom in contemporary structuralism, a movement to which he belonged only marginally at best, promoted thinking beyond the "I," subject, consciousness, author, and such concepts. However, it is very likely that Foucault, considering what he called "a special form of bio-ism" in Nietzsche's thought, and also referring to "an event whose possibility we can predict to the maximum, but whose form and promise we do not know at the moment", also thought about molecular genetics; The knowledge that in the future could erase the notion of "man" as well as the waves erase a face in the sand of the beach.

Foucault, who admired the French molecular biologists Jacques Mono and François Jacob, winners of the 1965 Nobel Prize, defended his "anti-humanism" not only by referring to the structuralism of Claude Levi-Strauss and Jacques Lacan, but also by emphasizing the importance of biology and the genetic code. Later, he even explicitly compared the genetic code with the concept of "discourse" in his thought.

This view also had certain political consequences. Foucault was asked if these attitudes were not too "cold". His answer was clear: Why, they are cold. According to Foucault, the goal of "we cold systematists" is to "free ourselves forever from humanism." According to him, this work was also a political activity; "Especially since all regimes, whether in the East or in the West, sell their rotten goods under the protective roof of humanitarianism."

By the 1970s, Foucault no longer invoked genetics in this way, but his disdain for the hypocrisy of the universally lauded humanism did not change. Moreover, the May 1968 movement and its consequences made him more politicized than ever before. He now, for all his intellectual reservations, considered himself a left-leaning but unorthodox intellectual.

For example, he reads the writings of the American "Black Panthers" with enthusiasm; A movement that, according to him, was "free from Marxist social theory". On a lecture tour of the United States, he met with socialist students, and in January 1969 he took up the chair of philosophy at the newly founded and openly leftist experimental University of Vincent. In short, he had now become one of the leading figures of the intellectual left in post-May 1968 Paris.

However, Foucault's political activity was not limited to attending round tables and issuing public statements. He was familiar with the Maoist group "Left Proletariat" through his friend, Daniel Defer; A group that operated secretly. Foucault began to support the imprisoned members of this group who were on hunger strike.

From these activities, "Information group about prisons" was formed. The goal of this group was to deliver questionnaires to the prisons, to allow the prisoners to talk about their situation in French prisons; Prisons that were known for inhuman conditions of imprisonment. The prison became the new subject of his research; However, he, who had just been appointed as a professor at the Collège de France, had publicly said goodbye to "blackening the pages of the book" and declared that he wanted to devote all his energy to political action.

TV debate with Noam Chomsky

Foucault's politicization and radicalization during those years was perhaps most evident in his famous televised debate with the American linguist Noam Chomsky in November 1971.

Speaking from a purely humanist position, Chomsky emphasized that the struggle of the proletariat must be based on "true concepts of justice, honor, love, kindness and empathy." But Foucault, in a provocative tone and evidently pleased to provoke the debate, replied that the proletariat does not fight the ruling class "because it considers this fight to be just," but because it "wants to take power itself for the first time in history."

He then added that the proletariat, once it "takes power, [...] will exercise dictatorial and even bloody power" and continued nonchalantly: "I don't know what objection can be made to this."

These words certainly seemed radical and deeply shocked Chomsky. However, this position was largely nothing more than a Nietzschean-tinged show.

Foucault really agreed with Nietzsche that the genealogical root of all political struggles and social conflicts is ultimately nothing but a "bloody" and "endless" struggle between the rulers and the ruled. But this view for him did not mean accepting the Marxist model of the revolution. Nor did he have any exaggerated hopes for the French industrial proletariat.

The people he attracted and the groups he supported were completely different. Shortly before the conversation with Chomsky, he participated for the first time with Jean-Paul Sartre in a demonstration in support of Algerian immigrants and formed a committee to investigate the issue of racism in France. Shortly after the televised debate, he also demonstrated with the families of the prisoners.

He later supported Soviet dissidents and Vietnamese refugees fleeing their country by boat. In 1981, after the declaration of martial law in Poland, within a few months he organized a financial aid fund for the solidarity movement "Solidarnoosh" and transported medicine to Gdańsk. Finally, in March 1984, while seriously ill, he supported immigrants from Mali and Senegal who were being evicted from their homes.

His prison book titled "Care and Punishment" published in 1975 reflected this political and practical position. The book described Jeremy Bentham's 'Panopticon' surveillance mechanism, albeit in a very dark tone, as a model for a society-wide disciplinary machine.

Workers were the last group that came to Foucault's mind. First of all, he spoke of "lunatics, children, students and the colonized" and only after that he mentioned those who are "linked to the production machine and controlled throughout their lives".

The same order can be seen in another part of the book: first "convicts", then "patients", "lunatics" and "children" and finally "workers". All these groups are disciplined in the panopticon machine, given a "soul" - that is, a conscience - and forced to work productively.

However, it cannot be ignored that Foucault remained loyal to Marx's critique of capitalism with his harsh criticism of the exploitative function of "disciplinary society" - a term he used himself; However, the dialectical philosophy did not accept Marx's history explicitly and opposed the reduction of consciousness to social existence.

Experiencing life as a gay man

But whatever judgment we have about Foucault, his continuous practical solidarity and theoretical attention to patients, deviants from social norms, those who are discriminated against on the basis of their race or descent, and marginalized groups can only be understood when we also consider his homosexuality.

The experience of living as a gay man, in a situation where the French justice system always raised the possibility of his punishment, along with the persistent feeling of not fitting in with society and an experience that today can be called "queer" - although Foucault himself did not use this term - since the publication of the book "History of Madness" in 1961, had turned him into a thinker about deviation from norms and social rejection.

This approach was far from the New Left's hopes for the awakening of the "revolutionary subject" and the realization of the "dictatorship of the proletariat" in the future.

His famous theory of power, which was first presented coherently in his book Prison, did not consider power to be merely the power of the state or class to be exercised from "above" to "below"; However, he did not deny such a possibility. Foucault considered power to be more fundamental than this, a set of "force relations" in all areas of society; Relationships, many of which have a "normative, normative and normalizing" function in the conditions of modernity.

From 1976, Foucault intensified his criticism of the New Left from this point of view. In the short book "The Will to Know" - a work that was first noticed mostly by homosexuals and feminists - he questioned with a tone mixed with sarcasm and mockery the belief of the left in May 1968 in sexual "liberation" as a revolutionary act.

In his view, while the New Left considered sexual liberation a revolutionary act, the obsessive focus on sexuality had become a tool in the hands of the normalizing bourgeois forces since the late 18th century.

At this stage, power was no longer merely about disciplining the body, as it was proposed in the book "Care and Punishment"; Rather, he stimulated the sexual desire through it, which is the connecting link between the individual and the population, to control both.

Foucault also, based on this understanding of "biopolitics", drew a theory about racism that the left had not been able to present in such a way until then, and this theory has remained influential to this day.

According to Foucault, racism has nothing to do with physical differences; Rather, it is essentially an act by which a group is completely rejected, to the extent that even the death of members of that group is considered acceptable. He considered racism "a tool for creating a gap […] between what should live and what should die."

Therefore, racism is formed through racialization: that is, the use of variable signs lacking inherent necessity to define a group, in such a way that the exclusion of that group becomes a systematic and potentially deadly process.

How should you think about resistance?

Emphasizing deviance from norms, being queer and criticizing racism, Foucault became a theorist of a new kind of left; A left that tries to strengthen resistance and emancipation possibilities in the complex network of contemporary power relations without "dialectical" illusions.

But Foucault's own theory of power gradually became an obstacle for him. If the subjects are completely controlled by the panopticon machine and even their "soul" or conscience is a product of this machine, how can we talk about resistance?

In the summer of 1978, Foucault read the book "Principle of Hope" written by Ernst Bloch, a Marxist influenced by Jewish thought; Bloch had died the year before. Foucault was strongly influenced by this theory that religious and spiritual hopes for the future can set revolutionary movements in motion.